Toby Johnson, L.P.T.

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Toby Johnson's books:

Toby's books are available as ebooks from smashwords.com, the Apple iBookstore, etc.

FINDING YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth of the Great Secret III

GAY SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness

GAY PERSPECTIVE: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature of God and the Universe

SECRET MATTER, a sci-fi novel with wonderful "aliens" with an Afterword by Mark Jordan

GETTING LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE:  A Fantastical Gay Romance set in two different time periods

THE FOURTH QUILL, a novel about attitudinal healing and the problem of evil

TWO SPIRITS: A Story of Life with the Navajo, a collaboration with Walter L. Williams




CHARMED LIVES: Spinning Straw into Gold: GaySpirit in Storytelling, a collaboration with Steve Berman and some 30 other writers

THE MYTH OF THE GREAT SECRET: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell

IN SEARCH OF GOD IN THE SEXUAL UNDERWORLD: A Mystical Journey

Unpublished manuscripts

About ordering

Books on Gay Spirituality:

White Crane Gay Spirituality Series

  Articles and Excerpts:

Review of Samuel Avery's The Dimensional Structure of Consciousness

Funny Coincidence: "Aliens Settle in San Francisco"

About Liberty Books, the Lesbian/Gay Bookstore for Austin, 1986-1996

The Simple Answer to the Gay Marriage Debate

A Bifurcation of Gay Spirituality

Why gay people should NOT Marry

The Scriptural Basis for Same Sex Marriage

Toby and Kip Get Married

Wedding Cake Liberation

Gay Marriage in Texas

What's ironic

Shame on the American People

The "highest form of love"

Gay Consciousness

Why homosexuality is a sin

The cause of homosexuality

The origins of homophobia

Q&A about Jungian ideas in gay consciousness

What is homosexuality?

What is Gay Spirituality?

My three messages

What Jesus said about Gay Rights

Queering religion

Common Experiences Unique to Gay Men

Is there a "uniquely gay perspective"?

The purpose of homosexuality

Interview on the Nature of Homosexuality

What the Bible Says about Homosexuality

Mesosexual Ideal for Straight Men

Varieties of Gay Spirituality

Waves of Gay Liberation Activity

The Gay Succession

Wouldn’t You Like to Be Uranian?

The Reincarnation of Edward Carpenter

Why Gay Spirituality: Spirituality as Artistic Medium

Easton Mountain Retreat Center

Andrew Harvey & Spiritual Activism

The Mysticism of Andrew Harvey

The upsidedown book on MSNBC

Enlightenment

"It's Always About You"

The myth of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara

Joseph Campbell's description of Avalokiteshvara

Gay Spirituality

Curious Bodies

What Toby Johnson Believes

The Joseph Campbell Connection

The Mann Ranch (& Rich Gabrielson)

Campbell & The Pre/Trans Fallacy

The Two Loves

The Nature of Religion

What's true about Religion

Being Gay is a Blessing

Drawing Long Straws

Freedom of Religion

The Gay Agenda

Gay Saintliness

Gay Spiritual Functions

The subtle workings of the spirit in gay men's lives.

The Sinfulness of Homosexuality

Proposal for a study of gay nondualism

Priestly Sexuality

Having a Church to Leave

Harold Cole on Beauty

Marian Doctrines: Immaculate Conception & Assumption

Not lashed to the prayer-post

Monastic or Chaste Homosexuality

Is It Time to Grow Up? Confronting the Aging Process

Notes on Licking  (July, 1984)

Redeem Orlando

Gay Consciousness changing the world by Shokti LoveStar

Alexander Renault interviews Toby Johnson

Mystical Vision

"The Evolution of Gay Identity"

"St. John of the Cross & the Dark Night of the Soul."

Avalokiteshvara at the Baths

 Eckhart's Eye

Let Me Tell You a Secret

Religious Articulations of the Secret

The Collective Unconscious

Driving as Spiritual Practice

Meditation

Historicity as Myth

Pilgrimage

No Stealing

Next Step in Evolution

The New Myth

The Moulting of the Holy Ghost

Gaia is a Bodhisattva

The Hero's Journey

The Hero's Journey as archetype -- GSV 2016

The  Gay Hero Journey (shortened)

You're On Your Own

Superheroes

Seeing Differently

Teenage Prostitution and the Nature of Evil

Allah Hu: "God is present here"

 
Adam and Steve

The Life is in the Blood

Gay retirement and the "freelance monastery"

Seeing with Different Eyes

Facing the Edge: AIDS as an occasion for spiritual wisdom

What are you looking for in a gay science fiction novel?

The Vision

The mystical experience at the Servites'  Castle in Riverside

A  Most Remarkable Synchronicity in Riverside

The Great Dance according to C.S.Lewis

The Techniques Of The World Saviors

Part 1: Brer Rabbit and the Tar-Baby

Part 2: The Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara

Part 3: Jesus and the Resurrection

Part 4: A Course in Miracles

The Secret of the Clear Light

Understanding the Clear Light

Mobius Strip

Finding Your Tiger Face

How Gay Souls Get Reincarnated

About Alien Abduction

In honor of Sir Arthur C Clarke

Karellen was a homosexual

The D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance

Intersections with the movie When We Rise

More about Gay Mental Health

Psych Tech Training

Toby at the California Institute

The Rainbow Flag

Ideas for gay mythic stories

People

Kip and Toby, Activists

Toby's friend and nicknamesake Toby Marotta.

Harry Hay, Founder of the gay movement

About Hay and The New Myth

About Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the first man to really "come out"

About Michael Talbot, gay mystic

About Fr. Bernard Lynch

About Richard Baltzell

About Guy Mannheimer

About David Weyrauch

About Dennis Paddie

About Ask the Fire

About Arthur Evans

About Christopher Larkin

About Mark Thompson

About Sterling Houston

About Michael Stevens

The Alamo Business Council

Our friend Tom Nash

Second March on Washington

The Gay Spirituality Summit in May 2004 and the "Statement of Spirituality"

Book Reviews

Toby Johnson's Books on Gay Men's Spiritualities:

Gay Perspective

Things Our [Homo]sexuality
Tells Us about the
Nature of God and
the Universe

Gay Spirituality

Gay Identity and 
the Transformation of
Human Consciousness

Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling

edited by
Toby Johnson
& Steve Berman








Secret Matter

Lammy Award Winner for Gay Science Fiction

updated








Getting Life in Perspective

A Fantastical Romance

The Fourth Quill

originally published as PLAGUE

The Fourth Quill is available as an audiobook, narrated by Jimmie Moreland. Click here

Two Spirits: A Story of Life with the Navajo

with Walter L. Williams

Two Spirits  is available as an audiobook  narrated by Arthur Raymond. Click here

Finding Your Own True Myth:

The Myth of the Great Secret III









In Search of God  in the Sexual Underworld












The Myth of the Great Secret: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell.

This was the second edition of this book.

San Francisco Days 1970-1981

In 1974-75, Toby Johnson took a course at Napa Community College in Napa, California for licensure as a Psychiatric Technician. The Psych Tech license is a license in California in nursing with a specialization in psychiatry.

In the 1960s, the Psych Tech training was the same as that for Licensed Vocational Nurses—L.V.N.—for the first three academic quarters, that is, the first school year. The second half year, LVNs study obstetrics and pediatrics, while LPTs focus specifically and exclusively on psychiatry and mental health hospitalization.

The Pysch Tech training at Napa Community College coordinated with the Napa State Hospital across the highway from the community college. Students did their practicum training at the State Hospital.

Johnson had learned about psych techs from Terry Carlson. In 1971, while he was studying at the California Institute of Asian Studies (C.I.A.S.)—now the California Institute of Integral Studies (C.I.I.S.)—which was then located at 21st and Dolores on the edge of San Francisco's Mission District and of the Castro, through Ken Dyer, whom he met through mutual friend Peter Roy, Toby befriended a sort of "hippie household" who lived up 21st St from the Institute in a wonderful five bedroom, three-storey house with a view looking out over Dolores Park. The head of the household was Tom Rhodes. Toby had met Dyer a few months before; he was invited for Christmas Dinner with that household in 1970. At that dinner or another soon after, he met Carlson who, recently out of the Navy where he'd worked in psychiatric services, was now working at Mount Zion Hospital's Crisis Clinic.

Having been interested in mental health services to the psychiatrically disabled—as a current day manifestation of what in Jesus's day were the lepers—since he'd worked as a "Hospital Chaplin Intern" while still a Servite seminarian, Johnson was fascinated by Terry's stories about the Crisis Clinic.

Also during those days Toby was friends with Rhonda Zobel, a young woman with wonderful flaming red hair, who worked as assistant to the Institute Librarian.

After completing his course work for a Master's Degree in Comparative Religions from CIAS, and realizing that degree offered no particular job opportunities—and was, in fact, working as a hippie carpenter and general factotum for his Tantra teacher at the Institute, Kim McKell, PhD—Johnson decided to pursue the psych tech training with the aim of getting a job at Mt. Zion in the same unit where Terry Carlson, L.P.T. worked.

Toby was dating Guy Mannheimer at that time. Guy had some interest in mental health (though mainly, so far, as a client) and both of them were looking for jobs. They'd spent the summer of ’72 together working at the Mann Ranch Seminars. At the end of the summer, Guy moved back to his home at Werder House in Menlo Park (2100 Santa Cruz Ave) next to Stanford University. (Previously the house had been home to members of the Grateful Dead—They called it The Chateau. It is credited with being one of the first "hippie-group-living-together" situations).

Toby got an apartment with his college friend Paul DePalma and a medical student named John Shapiro ON THE CORNER OF HAIGHT & ASHBURY. When Toby and Paul found an apartment at that location for rent they decided they had to live there, no matter what the state of the apartment! In fact it wasn't bad—though Toby's mother burst into tears when she walked into it at the very thought of her son living in such poverty. But the neighborhood had gone down hill from the days of the Summer of Love. And Toby, Paul and John only stayed there six months. (The turret behind the familiar street sign was in our apartment.) Major gay philosopher, political activist Arthur Evans ended up living in the apartment next door. It wasn't till Toby and Guy returned to S.F. in 1975 and got involved with Bay Area Gay Liberation (BAGL) that Toby met Arthur. (Read about Arthur Evans)

Here's that corner in 2013:

The flat was the top floor with the turret overlooking the corner. Toby's room was just beyond the bay window which was in the living room, to the left, on Haight, (above the banner with the red heart emblem). Paul had the turret room, John the room with two windows to the the right. The entrance was in the landing with the two arches to the right of the fireplug. Arthur's flat had the bay windows on the top floor directly above the first tree on Ashbury.




(Paul moved in with his girlfriend and Toby and John moved to a houseboat in Sausalito on Pier 11 1/2 to housesit for Dee Cameron; John got sick that summer and moved back to Boston and never really lived in the houseboat. Toby ended up sharing the boat with Dee's friend's sister, a wonderful woman, Freddie Cobey, the first "computer programmer" Toby'd ever met.)


Toby and Guy made the decision to join the psych tech training when it was discovered a friend of Toby's from Gay Rap and the San Francisco Gay Counseling Service, Peter Goldblum, had just gotten a job teaching psychology in the program at Napa College.

At first, Toby, Guy, and Leslie Peterson moved into a little house on Coombs St—#546 to be specific. We lived there a few months, then moved down the street.

We moved in with our friend Peter Goldblum who was forming a whole household—in a neat old house on the southern edge of downtown Napa at 400 Coombs—that included Toby, Guy and Leslie, Spider O'Toole, Doug Fairchild, Peter Hall, along with several others — and Susie Dosen and her boyfriend. Susie had a wonderful big white cat named Buffalo who'd jump into your lap, climb up and put one paw on each of your shoulders and nuzzle your neck.

Tho' there were two front doors, we'd combined the two floors into a single house with seven bedrooms.

In those days, there was a great fig tree that filled the side yard (shown in the lower photo).

The Psych Tech training was a wonderful—though sometimes emotionally wrenching—experience. The class consisted of about 35 students, most of us full-grown adults, though a few junior-college-aged young people—since the program was admininistered through Napa Community College and the classroom buildings were in an annex off the backside of Napa College. Among the teachers were Geneva Link, Patty Vale (a very stylish lady with a marvelous personality) and, of course, Peter Goldblum.

In 1975, Guy and Toby completed the training, got their licenses and moved back to San Francisco; they took an apartment on 18th St between Noe and Sanchez just down the street from the 18th and Castro gay nexus. Toby went by Mt Zion and, lo and behold, there was a job opening. He applied and got the job immediately. It was like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

(There's a story about the flat on 18th Street on the Castro Whistle Program at whistle.html.)

For three years, Toby worked at Mt. Zion in The Westside Crisis Clinic of Westside Mental Health. Among the other psych techs and crisis clinic staff were: Terry Carlson (who by that time was going by the single initial "T"), Oscar Peterson (who went by "O.P." —nurses, maybe especially male nurses, take on their initials as first name because it is how they sign medication orders they've administered), Richard Gibson, David Navarro, Christine Porter, Rudy Smith, MSW, Hilda Wedel, RN, Don Tusel, MD.

Toby stayed at that job while he went back to C.I.A.S. to complete the Master's and then go on to a PhD in "Counseling Psychology." His class, which included Art Rosengarten, Howard  Rossman, Barry Shea, Ann Sibary, was the "test class" for acceditation for the Institute. Toby Johnson, in fact, was the first PhD graduate in the Counseling Dept. The school changed its name the year they graduated. (The members of that class actually received two diplomas—one with the name as CIAS, the other CIIS.)


Johnson worked as an intern at The Tenderloin Clinic, a community mental health unit in downtown S.F. which had an official mandate to provide services to the City's gay and lesbian population. The Tenderloin Clinic's gay services actually evolved out of the peer couseling program Toby had helped Cliff Kraus establish a few years prior out of the Gay Rap program that met at a hippie community center called Alternative Futures on West Pine. (For a year or so, the counseling service operated out of the house Toby lived in on Arguello St at Clement in the Richmond District with a household that included Michael Ackerman and Dennis Conkin.) Cliff was very good at public relations and took the idea of gays-for-gays in counseling to the city's mental health providers. The D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance developed from disgruntled lesbian social workers at the Clinic who felt we couldn't fulfill our gay/lesbian mandate because we were burdened with so many responsibilities for general psychatric patients in the downtown Tenderloin neighborhood (Ricki Boden, Phern Hunt, Carol Hastie, Mavis DeWees, JoAnn Lovejoy, David Greenberg, Karin Wandrei, etc.). DAFODIL inadvertently, I think, changed gay history, by getting the gays-for-gays model adopted as policy for the San Francisco Dept of Health and Black lesbian mother Pat Norman hired as director of gay/lesbian services.

This "Gay Clients' Bill of Rights" came to the fore a few years later when AIDS appeared and San Francisco was able to mount a response because there were gay clinicians and because there was no stigma for them to work with gay patients with a "gay disease," the way there was in other parts of the country.

While Toby was working there, first as an intern and then as paid staff, the Clinic moved from the Golden Gate YMCA Bldg to Hyde Street and Jerry Polon became Director of the Clinic.


Also at the California Institute in those days were Elizabeth Kent and Melinda Guyol—who went on to create Southern Dharma Foundation in Hot Springs, NC out of conversations a group of (mostly non-gay) students at the Institute conducted in monthly dinner parties about how we could take our comparative religions training into our professions as mental health workers.

Toby Johnson left San Francisco in 1981 and spent that summer with Elizabeth and Melinda in North Carolina helping to clear the land for the meditation hall at Southern Dharma. (Among their North Carolina friends with Alan Troxler and Carl Whitman.) Johnson wrote his second book IN SEARCH OF GOD IN THE SEXUAL UNDERWORLD that summer, reporting on the very eventful experience he'd had the previous couple of years working with Toby Marotta and URSA on the Hustler Study.




Follow-up:
This webpage was patently intended to attract the attention of Toby Johnson's old friends from 1970s California. That is why so many people are mentioned by name; when they go googling themselves (as we all should do regularly—for all sorts of reasons), they'll find this page.

In summer of 2008, the net tossed out by the mention of the Psych Tech training at Napa introduced Toby to Renee Romanoff who'd been in a class a couple of years ahead of his; she'd later worked at the hospital and became friends with Susie Dosen when they worked on the same ward. Renee's email is renee22754@gmail.com